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Seeman, Morris, and Summers misrepresent or misunderstand the arguments we have made, as well as their own previous work. Here, we correct these inaccuracies. We also reiterate our support for hypothesis-driven and evidence-based research.

ITH its waters connecting the continents of Europe, Africa, North America, and South America, the Atlantic Ocean has facilitated a sustained movement and interaction among the peoples of these disparate lands. The appellation "Atlantic world" is not only a geographic expression but also a metaphor for the organic and human linkages that characterize it. This majestic ocean has been traversed by intrepid explorers, voluntary and involuntary immigrants, persons in quest of fortunes, and people in chains. Its history is fraught with examples of human daring, conquest of new horizons, and realization of dreams. But it is also a chronicle of violence, suffering, and death. My main concern here is not the many faces, voices, and roles of the Atlantic, but rather the human and cultural contacts between Africa and the Americas that its waters facilitated in the century and a half that followed Christopher Columbus's voyages to the Americas. The crucial role of the Atlantic in the shaping of the Americas is often taken for granted; we seldom recognize that it was a significant agency in the peopling of the societies and in the cross-fertilization of the cul tures and ideas in the lands that it bathes. The history of the African slave trade is increasingly well known and hardly bears any repeating here. The "middle passage," as the terrifying voyage across the Atlantic to the Americas came to be called, remains the most horrible and enduring symbol of the human traffic. In time, the Atlantic Ocean came to be identified with black captivity, debasement, and suffering. Contemporaries and historians have recounted the confinement of the Africans, the ravages of dis

American archaeology within the US today is focused on the identification and evaluation of historic properties in accordance with federal and state historic preservation legislation. While this has created a substantial body of work, for the most part, these studies are not visible or frankly of much value to the general public. Citing examples from the cultural resources management industry, the importance of public education and outreach is considered.

A 2017 Amerind Foundation Seminar involving leadership representatives of the Society for American Archaeology, the Society for Historical Archaeology, the American Anthropological Association, the Archaeological Institute of America, the American Cultural Resources Association, the National Park Service, the National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation, the SRI Foundation, and other senior scholars resulted in an Action Plan that addressed the political threats to archaeology in the US, as well as the benefits and values of archaeology and the various constituencies and stakeholders of the archaeological world. A participant in the seminar and action plan, the author reviews these values and presents two scenarios, African American community engagement and the Veterans Curation Program, that illustrate the public benefits of an engaged archaeology.

A number of recent works have explored the value of scholarly efforts to “unpack” museum collections and examine the constitutive networks and histories of objects. The interrogations of collections through methods such as object biographies and itineraries imparts important knowledge about the institutions, disciplines, and individuals who made museum collections, contribute to deeper understandings of the roles of objects in creating meaning in and of the world, and suggest implications for future practice and policies. This article examines the object itinerary of a cultural property item of negative heritage: a three-dimensional painted plaster work of craft-art originally designed to symbolize the scientific practice of anthropology in early twentieth-century Germany and later associated with wartime collecting during World War II, the history of American archaeology, and the modern repatriation movement in museums.

In December of 1934 the Society for American Archaeology was officially constituted. In 1935, in an effort to grow the membership, professional archaeologists were asked to propose members who they endorsed to become affiliated with the SAA. The two professional archaeologists in Canada at that time, Diamond Jenness and William J. Wintemberg of the Dominion Museum, Ottawa, proposed names of individuals across Canada who were collectors, museum curators, and historians. A small number suggested for membership joined, but most did not. This was an interesting period in North American archaeology as professionals worked in committees to establish cultural and temporal frameworks of the archaeological past, establish excavation guidelines, and lobby against the sale of antiquities. Some Canadian avocationals who joined were positively impacted by their association with American archaeologists and their legacies continue through to today. The bottom line is that there were very few professional archaeologists in Canada following Wintemberg’s death in 1941, and that lack coupled with WWII, meant that Canadians looking for professional support and guidance looked to the south of the border. The Society for American Archaeology was important for the growth and development of Canadian archaeology during this time.

From the 1930s to the late 1970s, American archaeologists pursued a paired agenda of science and salvage such that their focus on logical positivism converged with US foreign policy towards interna...

This article presents results to date of the Dating Iroquoia project. Our objective is to develop high-precision radiocarbon chronologies for northeastern North American archaeology. Here, we employ Bayesian chronological modeling of 184 AMS radiocarbon dates derived from 42 Northern Iroquoian village sites in five regional sequences in order to construct new date estimates. The resulting revised chronology demands a rethinking of key assumptions about cultural process in the region regarding the directionality and timing of processes of coalescence and conflict and the introduction of European trade goods. The results suggest that internal conflict may have preceded confederacy formation among the Haudenosaunee but not the Wendat, as has been previously assumed. External conflict, previously thought to have begun in the early seventeenth century, began more than a century earlier. New data also indicate that the timing and distribution of European materials were more variable between communities than acknowledged by the logic underlying traditional trade-good chronologies. This enhanced chronological resolution permits the development and application of archaeological theories that center the lived experiences and relational histories of Iroquoian communities, as opposed to the generalized thinking that has dominated past explanatory frameworks.

Bayesian analysis of radiocarbon (14C) dates in North American archaeology is increasing, especially among archaeologists working in deeper time. However, historical archaeologists have been slow to embrace these new techniques, and there have been only a few examples of the incorporation of calendar dates as informative priors in Bayesian models in such work in the United States. To illustrate the value of Bayesian approaches to sites with both substantial earlier Native American occupations as well as a historic era European presence, we present the results of our Bayesian analysis of 14C dates from the earlier Guale village and the Mission period contexts from the Sapelo Shell Ring Complex (9MC23) in southern Georgia. Jefferies and Moore have explored the Spanish Mission period deposits at this site to better understand the Native American interactions with the Spanish during the 16th and 17th centuries along the Georgia Coast. Given the results of our Bayesian modeling, we can say with some degree of confidence that the deposits thus far excavated and sampled contain important information dating to the 17th-century mission on Sapelo Island. In addition, our modeling of new dates suggests the range of the pre-Mission era Guale village. Based on these new dates, we can now say with some degree of certainty which of the deposits sampled likely contain information that dates to one of the critical periods of Mission period research, the AD 1660–1684 period that ushered in the close of mission efforts on the Georgia Coast.

On September 15 and 16, 2017, the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University hosted a workshop of 20 archaeologists from across the Americas and the Caribbean. Workshop proceedings demonstrate how a focus on Afro-Latin America challenges crucial concerns in archaeology. Likewise, workshop discussions showed the transformative contributions that archaeology makes to anthropology and to Afro-Latin American studies, including deeper understanding of the dynamics of African diaspora, racialization, colonialism, early modern economies, social hierarchies and slavery, consumerism, ontologies, biopolitics, aesthetics, cultural heritage, and contemporary struggles for sovereignty. In this paper we delineate the field of Afro-Latin American Archaeology using mainly the debates that took place in our workshop. Our aim is to highlight how Afro-Latin American Archaeology can contribute to anthropology, to Afro-Latin American studies, and to the politics of afro-reparations as well.

Birdstones are an enigmatic and diverse group of objects found across eastern North America with concentrations around the Great Lakes region. Via speculative interpretations of form, analogical co...

This is an introduction to the special issue entitled “Beyond (within, through) the Grid: Mapping and Historical Archaeology.” The papers in this issue emerge from a 2017 Society for American Archaeology session, in which archaeologists considered the intersections of mapping and historical archaeology. In this volume, the papers expand upon these discussions and explore the ways in which mapping can generate new archaeological data and contribute to methodological and theoretical problems in historical archaeology. Together, they consider the interplay between visibility and invisibility, the visualization of embodied experience, mapping power and resistance, and the use of mapping in heritage practices.

A recent Society for American Archaeology poll of Americans over the age of 18 revealed that while 93% of Americans believe that the ‘work archaeologists do is important,’ only half of Americans ar...

Global crises drastically alter human behavior, rapidly impacting patterns of movement and consumption. A rapid-response analysis of material culture brings new perspective to disasters as they unfold. We present a case study of the coronavirus pandemic in Tromsø, Norway, based on fieldwork from March 2020 to April 2021. Using a methodology rooted in social distancing and through systematic, diachronic, and spatial analysis of trash (e.g., discarded gloves, sanitization products), signage, and barriers, we show how material perspectives improve understanding of relationships between public action and government policy (in this case examined in relation to the Norwegian concept of collective labor, dugnad). We demonstrate that the materiality of individual, small-scale innovations and behaviors that typified the pandemic will have the lowest long-term visibility, as they are increasingly replaced or outnumbered by more durable representations generated by centralized state and corporate bodies that suggest close affinity between state directive and local action. We reflect on how the differential durability of material responses to COVID-19 will shape future memories of the crisis.

Remote sensing in North American archaeology, largely meaning archaeological applications of geophysics, or archaeogeophysics, has become something of a distinct subfield that was at one time domin...

To understand the implications of archaeological site recording practices and associated inventories for studying Indigenous persistence after the arrival of Europeans, we examined the documentary record associated with nearly 900 archaeological sites in Marin County, California. Beginning with the first regional surveys conducted during the early 1900s and continuing into the present, the paper trail created by archaeologists reveals an enduring emphasis on precontact materials to the exclusion of more recent patterns of Indigenous occupation and land use. In assessing sites occupied by Indigenous people from the late sixteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, we discuss how the use of multiple lines of evidence—including temporally diagnostic artifacts, chronometric dating techniques, and historical documentation—may help illuminate subtle but widespread patterns of Native presence that have been obscured by essentialist assumptions about Indigenous culture change. Our findings further reveal the shortcomings of traditional site recording systems, in which archaeologists typically categorize sites within the prehistoric-protohistoric-historic triad on the basis of commonsense decisions that conflate chronology with identity. Instead, we argue for recording practices that focus specifically on the calendric ages of occupation for any given site.

A case study of the history of exploration of the archaeological locality known as Quirigua, in the lowlands of Guatemala, serves as a starting point for more general considerations on the nature of archaeology as a scientific discipline in its wider social and political context. Archaeology had been, since its commencement in the 19th century, under the influence of the reigning ideologies of the day, nationalism and imperialism, and this strongly shaped the nature of the research and the presentation of its outcomes; not to mention many other diverse factors, such as institutional competition and personal ambitions, that reflected on the scientific endeavors. On the basis of the case of Quirigua, the possessive attitude of the early explorers (John Stephens, Alfred Mauldsay etc.) and the subsequent domination of the site by the United Fruit Company, as well as the aspirations of North American scientific institutions (School of American Archaeology, Carnegie Foundation) are explored with respect to the interpretations of the pre-Colombian Maya civilization coined by them. The present text does not aspire to a thorough analysis of the problem of relations between nationalism, imperialism and archaeology in Latin America, but rather a presentation of one specific case illustrative of the basic premise of the necessity to always take into account the broader context in which the scientific “truths” are produced.

Equity and the dissemination of knowledge remain major challenges in science. Peer-reviewed journal publications are generally the most cited, yet certain groups dominate in archaeology. Such uniformity of voice profoundly limits not only who conveys the past but also what parts of the material record are narrated and/or go untold. This study examines multiple participation metrics in archaeology and explores the intersections of gender and occupational affiliation in peer-reviewed (high time cost) and non-peer-reviewed (reduced time cost) journals. We find that although women and compliance archaeologists remain poorly represented in regional and national peer-reviewed journals, they are much more active in unrefereed publications. We review feminist and theoretical explanations for inequities in science and argue that (1) the persistent underrepresentation of women and of compliance professionals in archaeological publishing are structurally linked processes and (2) such trends can be best understood in light of the existing structure of American archaeology and the cost-benefit realities of publishing for people in various sectors of the discipline. We suggest that nonrefereed venues offer a pathway to multivocality and help to address epistemic injustices, and we discuss methods for widening the current narrow demographic of men and academics who persist in dominating discourses.

In this paper, I explore the parallel trajectories of anthropological archaeological and Austrian economic thought from central Europe to the Anglosphere. I note the work of Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) and Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992). Tracing the influence that similar theoretical perspectives has had on their respective fields, I particularly investigate the concept of methodological individualism within American archaeology in the twentieth century. This work therefore is a general abstract for the various points of contact between Austrian Economics and anthropological archaeology over the course of their intellectual histories.

The Clovis techno-complex has figured prominently in American archaeology since the 1930s, when fluted stone weapon tips and other tools were found alongside the remains of late Pleistocene...

The papers in this special issue arise from the Status and Identity in the Imperial Andes session held at the 2017 meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in Vancouver, Canada. That session focused on the role of status and power in shaping colonial interactions and identities throughout the Andes during the fifteenth to seventeenth century CE. The papers in this issue examine how Inka and colonial period individuals (indigenous, African, Iberian, mestizo, etc.) selectively incorporated or rejected Imperial goods, and how differing levels of access to these goods may have influenced social status, health, and relationships with imperial actors.

Since its enactment over five decades ago, the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) and the organizations, policies, and regulations implementing it have strongly influenced how archaeology is conducted in the United States. The NHPA created a national network of archaeologists in government agencies. This network reviews the possible impact on important archaeological resources of tens of thousands of public projects planned each year. These reviews often include investigations, of which there have been millions. The archaeological profession has shifted from one oriented mainly on academic research and teaching to one focused on field investigations, planning, resource management, public outreach, and resource protection, bundled under the term cultural resource management (CRM). Since 1966, growth has produced good outcomes as well as some troubling developments. Current and new challenges include avoiding lock-step, overly bureaucratic procedures and finding the financial, professional, and technical resources, as well as political support, to build on the achievements so far.

In the 1970s, Paul Martin proposed that big game hunters armed with fluted projectile points colonized the Americas and drove the extinction of megafauna. Around fifty years later, the central role of humans in the extinctions is still strongly debated in North American archaeology, but little considered in South America. Here we analyze the temporal dynamic and spatial distribution of South American megafauna and fluted (Fishtail) projectile points to evaluate the role of humans in Pleistocene extinctions. We observe a strong relationship between the temporal density and spatial distribution of megafaunal species stratigraphically associated with humans and Fishtail projectile points, as well as with the fluctuations in human demography. On this basis we propose that the direct effect of human predation was the main factor driving the megafaunal decline, with other secondary, but necessary, co-occurring factors for the collapse of the megafaunal community. Human arrival in South America predated the extinction of regional megafauna by a substantial margin, which has suggested a different cause for the extinctions. However, here, the authors show that megafaunal extinctions do correspond to the spread of hunting tools and human population shifts., Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo

In the USA in the mid-1970s the term ‘conservation archaeology’ became popular about the same time as the phrase ‘cultural resource management’ first came into use. An important concept in the US conservation movement is ‘stewardship’. By the early 1970s in the USA archaeological sites and materials had come to be seen as ‘resources’ – ‘cultural resources’, analogous to ‘natural resources’. Consciousness of these characteristics of the ‘archaeological record’ developed among some North American archaeologists in the late 1960s, a few years before the concepts of ‘cultural resources’ and their ‘management’ became explicit. World archaeology has a similar regional ‘conscience society’ – the American Society for Conservation Archaeology (ASCA). The ASCA performs similar functions in similar ways: it usually sponsors a symposium at the Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, which focuses attention on fundamental issues.

Over the course of the discipline, archaeological investigations have toggled between history and process, with the current emphasis being increasingly placed on historical aspects. Rather than seeing this as a choice to make, Cook agrees with those that see both as being necessary to understand the full dimensions of the human problems we investigate. Cook presents a Fort Ancient/Mississippian culture case study that explores various dimensions of this research philosophy. This is followed by a discussion that explores the theoretical toggling that seems to occur more so as studies that emphasize one extreme end of the historical-processual continuum seem to be exhausted.

This entry presents a brief history of the emergence of feminism, gender, and queer in North American archaeology, which, along with the United Kingdom and Scandinavia to a lesser degree, represent ...

Radiocarbon dating is rarely used in historical or contact-era North American archaeology because of idiosyncrasies of the calibration curve that result in ambiguous calendar dates for this period. We explore the potential and requirements for radiocarbon dating and Bayesian analysis to create a time frame for early contact-era sites in northeast North America independent of the assumptions and approximations involved in temporal constructs based on trade goods and other archaeological correlates. To illustrate, we use Bayesian chronological modeling to analyze radiocarbon dates on short-lived samples and a post from four Huron-Wendat Arendarhonon sites (Benson, Sopher, Ball, and Warminster) to establish an independent chronology. We find that Warminster was likely occupied in 1615–1616, and so is the most likely candidate for the site of Cahiagué visited by Samuel de Champlain in 1615–1616, versus the other main suggested alternative, Ball, which dates earlier, as do the Sopher and Benson sites. In fact, the Benson site seems likely to date ~50 years earlier than currently thought. We present the methods employed to arrive at these new, independent age estimates and argue that absolute redating of historic-era sites is necessary to accurately assess existing interpretations based on relative dating and associated regional narratives.

This special section stems from discussions that took place in a forum at the Society for American Archaeology's annual conference in 2017. The forum, Beyond Data Management: A Conversation about “Digital Data Realities”, addressed challenges in fostering greater reuse of the digital archaeological data now curated in repositories. Forum discussants considered digital archaeology beyond the status quo of “data management” to better situate the sharing and reuse of data in archaeological practice. The five papers for this special section address key themes that emerged from these discussions, including: challenges in broadening data literacy by making instructional uses of data; strategies to make data more visible, better cited, and more integral to peer-review processes; and pathways to create higher-quality data better suited for reuse. These papers highlight how research data management needs to move beyond mere “check-box” compliance for granting requirements. The problems and proposed solutions articulated by these papers help communicate good practices that can jumpstart a virtuous cycle of better data creation leading to higher impact reuses of data.

The ‘Digital Index of North American Archaeology’ (DINAA) project demonstrates how the aggregation and publication of government-held archaeological data can help to document human activity over millennia and at a continental scale. These data can provide a valuable link between specific categories of information available from publications, museum collections and online databases. Integration improves the discovery and retrieval of records of archaeological research currently held by multiple institutions within different information systems. It also aids in the preservation of those data and makes efforts to archive these research results more resilient to political turmoil. While DINAA focuses on North America, its methods have global applicability.

In spring 2013, the Society for American Archaeology created the Task Force on Gender Disparities in Archaeological Grant Submissions because of an apparent disparity in the rates of senior (post-PhD) proposal submissions by men and women to archaeology programs at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Although NSF success rates for men and women between 2009 and 2013 were roughly equal, the number of senior women archaeology submissions was half that of men. Given the documented increase in the proportion of women in academic archaeology, this representation of women seemed low. Moreover, submissions for NSF doctoral dissertation improvement grants were evenly divided between men and women. Statistics for Wenner-Gren noted the same general disparity in archaeology. This study examines and integrates a variety of data sources, including interviews with post-PhD women, to determine whether or not there is a problem in research grant submissions. Although the results indicate that there is a problem, it is multifaceted. Women are not well represented at research-intensive universities, and some women instead practice what we term “scaffolding” to integrate smaller pots of money to accomplish their research. Recommendations are provided for female applicants, academic departments, the Society for American Archaeology, and granting agencies.

In response to concerns regarding the social relevance of North American archaeology, it has been suggested that the tenets of ‘activist scholarship’ can provide a framework for a more publically engaged archaeological discipline. Maps have long been employed in the public dissemination of archaeological research results, but they can also play a role in enhancing public participation in heritage management initiatives. This article outlines how the goals of activist archaeology can be achieved through the mobilization of qualitative Geographic Information Systems practices, with an example of how ‘grounded visualization’ methods were employed in assessing the vulnerability of Inuvialuit cultural landscapes to the impacts of modern climate change.

Over the past several years, we have seen many attacks on publicly funded and mandated archaeology in the United States. These attacks occur at the state level, where governors and state legislatures try to defund or outright eliminate state archaeological programs and institutions. We have also seen several attacks at the federal level. Some members of Congress showcase archaeology as a waste of public tax dollars, and others propose legislation to move federally funded or permitted projects forward without consideration of impacts on archaeological resources. These attacks continue to occur, and we expect them to increase in the future. In the past, a vigilant network of historic preservation and archaeological organizations was able to thwart such attacks. The public, however, largely remains an untapped ally. As a discipline, we have not built a strong public support network. We have not demonstrated the value of archaeology to the public, beyond a scattering of educational and informational programs. In this article, we—a group of archaeologists whose work has focused on public engagement—provide a number of specific recommendations on how to build a strong public constituency for the preservation of our nation's archaeological heritage.

In the wide field of archaeology, stone tools are one of the major pieces of evidence to assess the knowledge and understanding of the peopling of the Americas. To answer anthropological questions concerning migration routes, colonization events, and further socio-cultural developments in the Americas, long term research has been directed to deepening the knowledge and understanding diverse technological topics of terminal Pleistocene/Early Holocene lithic remains, with particular focus on “fishtail”, “Fell’s cave”, or just “Fell” projectile points. Resulting from the research advances, this paper provides further detailed information to enlarge the database and morpho-technological knowledge of Fell points from north of the La Plata River, in the southern cone of South America. The analyzed sample has shown that there is broad technical and dimensional variability. Based on specific technological features and well-dated coeval finds, with some caution I consider the hypothesis that in certain places, the Fell points makers might have developed a regional variant with barbs or highly acute shoulders. The new observations have significant implications for understanding one of the earliest bifacial technologies in the archaeology of the Americas.

Explaining how and why populations settle a new landscape is central to many questions in American archaeology. Recent advances in settlement research have adopted predictions from the Ideal Free Distribution model (IFD). While tests of IFD predictions to date rely either on archaeologically derived coarse-grained diachronic data or ethnographically derived fine-grained synchronic data, here we provide the first test using historically derived data that is both fine-grained and diachronic. Fine-grain diachronic data allow us to test model predictions at a temporal scale in line with human settlement decisions and to validate proxies for application in archaeological contexts. To test model predictions pertaining to the relationship between population density and habitat quality, we use data from the historical settlement of Utah. The results demonstrate a negative relationship between population density and the quality of habitats occupied. These results are consistent with IFD predictions, suggesting that Euro-American settlement of Utah resulted from individuals attempting to maximize individual returns via agricultural productivity. Our results provide a quantitative and testable explanation for population dispersion over time and explain the spatial distribution of population density today. The results support predictions derived from a general theory of behavior, providing an explanatory framework for colonization events worldwide.

This volume stems from a symposium organised by the three authors at the 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology held in San Francisco in 2015. This was the first instance when the concept of Anthropic Activity Marker was discussed deeply in a public venue and in which researchers from different countries and with different perspectives got together to share the advances on this topic. Since then, the symposium has become a regular event at the SAA meetings and it has been organised as well at the 8th World Archaeological congress, celebrated in Tokyo (Japan) in June 2016, testifying the growing interest for this research topic.

Over the past three years (2012–2015), the North Dakota Man Camp Project has documented the archaeology of home in over 50 contemporary, short-term, workforce-housing sites in the Bakken oil patch in western North Dakota. This article integrates recent scholarship in global urbanism, archaeology of the contemporary past, and domesticity to argue that the expansion of temporary-workforce housing in the Bakken reflects a global periphery that lacks infrastructure or capital to respond rapidly to the pressures of an increasingly fluid movement of global capital and labor. The position of the Bakken produced short-term housing strategies that embrace both traditions of American domesticity and global trends in informal urbanism. A series of practical acts of architectural intervention straddle the line between the ideals of fixity characteristic of the American suburb and the mobility of recreational vehicles. The archaeological and architectural analysis of the Bakken man camps documents new forms of informal housing and offers a glimpse of the city yet to come.

Historical zooarchaeologists have made significant contributions to key questions about the social, economic, and nutritional dimensions of domestic animal use in North American colonial contexts; however, techniques commonly employed in faunal analyses do not offer a means of assessing many important aspects of how animals were husbanded and traded. We apply isotopic analyses to faunal remains from archaeological sites to assess the social and economic importance of meat trade and consumption of local and foreign animal products in northeastern North America. Stable carbon and nitrogen isotope analyses of 310 cattle and pigs from 18 rural and urban archaeological sites in Upper Canada (present-day southern Ontario, Canada; ca. A.D. 1790–1890) are compared with livestock from contemporary American sources to quantify the importance of meat from different origins at rural and higher- and lower-status urban contexts. Results show significant differences between urban and rural households in the consumption of local animals and meat products acquired through long-distance trade. A striking pattern in urban contexts provides new evidence for the social significance of meat origins in historical Upper Canada and highlights the potential for isotopic approaches to reveal otherwise-hidden evidence for social and economic roles of animals in North American archaeology.

North American archaeology is evaluated in light of state and heritage crime theory. When analyzed with preexisting typologies, the practice is shown to meet the threshold for state-sanctioned heritage crime. This study also demonstrates how current models of heritage crime do not adequately account for (1) the pivotal role states and state-sanctioned heritage experts play in committing heritage crime and (2) the implications of heritage crime for living descendant communities, not just physical artifacts and buildings. Typically thought of as crime against the state, seeing a state heritage regime as organized heritage crime opens the door to a host of theoretical and practical possibilities, including legal remedies for affected communities. Despite these opportunities, major impediments to meaningful change exist.

The current model for peopling of the Americas involves divergence from an ancestral Asian population followed by a period of population isolation and genetic diversification in Beringia, and finally, a rapid expansion into and throughout the Americas. Studies in the 1970s sought to characterize the biological relationships between different indigenous populations and first proposed an occupation of Beringia. More recent studies using molecular genetic markers often neglect to reference early works that laid the groundwork for current colonization models. We address this matter, and briefly summarize the literature and technological advances that contributed to our current understanding of the peopling of the Americas. Furthermore, we argue that describing the process of peopling of the Americas as "migrations from Asia" minimizes the significant genetic diversification that occurred outside of Asia, and offends indigenous Americans by discounting their origin narratives and land rights. Rather than referring to the indigenous peoples of the Americas as "migrants" or "immigrants," we recommend consistency in the language used to describe all post-glacial expansions of people into Asia, Europe and the Americas.

The creation of archaeological knowledge is profoundly contingent. Yet the preference for decontextualized philosophy among theoretical archaeologists has created conditions in which histor...